Perhaps in the same way that dog-owners grow to resemble their pets, when you
meet Nick Park, you are instantly reminded of his genial creation Wallace.
Park smiles gently, speaks softly and seems astonishingly shy for a
four-time Academy Award winner who signed a three-picture deal with Sony in
April. He offers tea and biscuits, and seems proud of the children’s toys,
soft chairs and doodled pictures that dot his chaotic office. Then, 10
minutes later, he turns into an ogre.
“Did you blow a whistle?” he yells at Dave Riddett, director of photography at
Aardman, the animation company with which Park works. Dave shakes his head
meekly, and Park swipes the model sheep that Riddett has been carefully
moving around a version of Wallace and Gromit’s village. Park then produces
his whistle, delivers a triumphant blast in Riddett’s face and hollers: “I’m
a-rustlin’!” It just goes to show how dangerous board games can be – they
will change a mild-mannered artist into a scheming super-villain faster than
a vat of radioactive chemicals.
The board game in question is Park’s own design. Called Fleeced!, it is the
result of 10 years’ thinking, planning and board-redrawing, although he
eschewed conventional marketing techniques when it came to road-testing it.
“I’ve been a big fan of board games since childhood,” Park explains.
“I still go to jumble sales and look for old games – I must have about 40. My
favourite is called Flutter. It’s all about the stock market, and I picked
it up for 40p at a car-boot sale.” He suddenly sounds determined. “So I
really only needed to play each version of the game with some friends to
know what to change. I’m better than any focus group.”
The game is based on a sort of genteel English sheep-rustling. Each of the six
playing pieces is an Aardman character – Wallace, Gromit, Shaun the Sheep et
al - and the idea is to get to the centre of the board, release sheep from
their hide-out, then lead them to your home square. When leading sheep, you
have to blow a whistle on every turn or they flee to the village green,
offering themselves with abandon to any passing player. You can steal sheep
another player has honestly rustled, giving the proceedings a delightfully
mean-spirited element that should enrage drunken grandparents and amuse the
young in equal measure.
There is also a faintly sinister undertone in the presence on the board of
Feathers McGraw, the dastardly penguin from The Wrong Trousers, and Preston,
the sheep thief from A Close Shave. Although it is never explicitly stated
in the pun-soaked rule book, it’s clear from the characters’ home squares
that any woolly bleaters they get their hands/paws/ flippers on will become
glue or grub in fairly short order. As the game is aimed at ages eight and
up, however, it’s probably best not to mention that on Christmas Day.
“It’s a very personal project for me,” Park says. “It’s like an actor writing
a novel. I’ve been really annoyed over recent years at how shoddy most board
games have become - they feel really cheap. I particularly hate the ones
that are just pencils and pads. I wanted nice figurines, heavy and well
made. The deal with Corgi is for 5,000 games, but if they sell, maybe it
will make some more. I was signing them in Hamleys the other day, and it
sold 250 in two hours, so hopefully people like it - although you do get the
sense that it’s all computer games these days.”
Curiously, that’s where Park is wrong. According to Lee Rastery, UK marketing
director for Monopoly’s owner, Hasbro, the number of board games sold has
risen by 15%in the past three years, with almost 20m games sold last year,
for a total of £152m. There have been tweaks to hardy perennials. For
instance, in November, Hasbro responded to soaring property prices by making
Knightsbridge the most expensive location on the Monopoly board, and added
Downing Street, Savile Row, £1,000 notes and skyscrapers. “The industry’s
big challenge is to introduce technology into games that adds real value to
the gameplay, but in a cost-effective manner,” Rastery says. “For us,
reinventions of classic games such as Monopoly Tropical Tycoon, which adds a
DVD, or Operation Rapid Response, with a heartbeat monitor, as well as TV-
and movie-linked products, are the way forward.” Perhaps the industry need
not bother. Since the introduction of the Atari games console in America,
board games have proved incredibly resilient. Twenty years on, an equal
number of traditional and electronic games (125m each) are sold annually
across the pond.
“What every great board game does is take the bad stress of socialising out of
the social situation, while leaving in the good stress - the frisson of
competition,” explains Jay Teitel, a psychologist and board-game designer.
“We usually play with friendly people, at a time of day when there’s less
outside pressure that might be inhibiting; and games impose a structure or
protocol that removes the often paralysing onus of social improvisation.” In
other words, games are an icebreaker.
Ignoring the value of alcohol in just these circumstances, Teitel goes on to
posit that games are actually an evolutionary tool. “We’re not trying to
balance career/family/ mortgage, we’re Colonel Mustard in the library with a
revolver,” he argues. “And we can act accordingly - which means,
paradoxically, we can act more like ourselves. For many players, this means
they can give themselves licence to be unabashedly competitive. It’s hard to
believe western society might not provide ample outlets for the release of
aggressive impulses, but watching a group of adults play Trivial Pursuit
after office hours is enough to quell anyone’s disbelief. In the
evolutionary sense, it’s not a stretch to regard games as collections of
dramatic roles meant to safely channel potentially deadly primitive
instincts.” What this suggests about Park’s surprisingly competitive play is
for a therapist, not a mere journalist, to speculate on.
Yet perhaps Teitel provides only part of the story. The strange rebirth of
board games finds echoes across our culture, as we seem to be happily
stepping back in time. Saturday-night television, for instance, is widely
seen as the broadcasting success story of the 21st century, rescuing an
evening’s viewing that had been all but abandoned. Its blend of Doctor Who
and variety turns such as The X Factor and Strictly Come Dancing is really
just a recreation of the same slot back in the 1970s. Elsewhere, sales of
banjos and ukuleles are going through the roof, folk music is back and the
fastest-growing sector in the hi-fi world is record players. In fact, indie
acts such as Superthriller and Arctic Monkeys are releasing some tracks on
vinyl only - a wilful rejection of the download. Of course, that’s rapid
growth from a very, very low base, and it would be a fool who bet on
turntables outstripping iPod sales in this or any other universe. As the
box-office collapse of complex indie movies about Iraq demonstrates,
however, in times of trouble, people rarely like to experiment.
This would suggest there’s a lot of money to be made in creating the perfect
board game, but you had better move quickly, in case peace breaks out and
the economy starts looking lively again. The problem is, almost nobody knows
how it’s done. “I’ve really no idea,” Park confesses. “I drew boards and
played with friends and tried variations, and I think I’ve got it right, but
I couldn’t say for sure.”
Back at Aardman’s Bristol headquarters, I’m finding myself - as Wallace -
roaming round in circles, desperate to get a Cheese Card (long story) or nab
some sheep. Finally, long after everyone else has banked plenty of the
mindless ruminants, I snare my share and make a dash for my two-up,
two-down. “Did you blow your whistle?” Park cries. I shake my head
mournfully, watching my herd flee to the green. And, finally, I realise one
key ingredient of any board game is that there has to be a big, fat loser.
But why is it always me?
